The Day Gone By (43 page)

I don't think many people can have been confronted with a situation like this. Some girls, of course, would have written a ‘Dear John' letter as soon as they were sure of their own mind. In that event I would have known what Jennifer had felt (and done) weeks before her lover died. But that wouldn't have been like Jennifer. She always used to let life slide. This was like - no, not like: it
was -
being introduced to an unknown man who, although dead, still had the power to cut you out. Of course I felt sorry for him and very sorry for Jennifer. But equally, of course, my sorrow was qualified; by knowing that Jennifer had been this chap's lover as she had not been mine; by the fact that he was dead; and by not being able to help feeling that I ought to have been told something sooner. (True, there had been no actual obligation on Jennifer to have told me anything at all, but a responsible girl would have done so.) What ought I to do, I wondered. There wasn't much to be done, except to reply to her letter with appropriate sympathy and hope that perhaps one day we might meet again as friends, etc. I did that, but of course it expressed little or nothing of what I really felt. I felt forsaken; or could it be, discarded? From my point of view, it didn't really make much difference that the poor chap was dead. Dead or alive, the fact remained that obviously Jennifer couldn't get back to feeling about me as she had formerly. She wouldn't be around again for a long time, if ever. The only sensible thing to do was to forget her by a deliberate act of will. (Her mother did write; a sweet letter, full of understanding, but of course it made no difference.)

In Captain Milner's office at Omagh there was an extremely pretty A.T.S. girl, who typed and answered the ‘phone. Her name was Kaye McNulty and her home was in Belfast. She was delighted to be asked out to dinner by a real lieutenant.

For me, our relationship was the equivalent of the ‘good long holiday abroad'. I wanted to be taken out of myself, and was ready enough to let Kaye and the relationship take us whither it would. It took us to bed, which was nice. Also, as every young man knows, it is gratifying to be seen around in public with a conspicuously pretty companion. Kaye was an Ulster girl, and this helped things along no bounds, since she knew the country well and enjoyed showing it to me. It created what I needed - a new world.

The Seskinore detachment, like all good things, came to an end and ‘G' section had to return to Langford Lodge. However, my relationship with Kaye was by no means fatally affected. She seemed to get week-ends off very much as though her job had been on a peace-time footing, and often it wasn't very difficult for me to get a twenty-four-hour pass. I couldn't, of course, keep things secret from my friends in the mess. One Saturday, when Kaye and I were having a drink in the lounge bar of one of the hotels in Belfast, some of my fellow subalterns happened to drop in. They left me in no doubt of their admiration for Kaye. Theo Overman, who used to devise topical lampoons to be sung in the mess when the beer was flowing, added another stanza to his version of ‘There ain't no flies on Auntie'.

Verse:
‘Oh, there ain't no flies on Dicky,

On Dicky, on Dicky.

There ain't no flies on Dicky

And I will tell you why.

To Seskinore the ‘G' men went

But with the A.T.S. his time was spent.

Oh, there ain't no flies on Dicky

And that's the reason why.'

Chorus:
‘Oh, there ain't no flies on Dicky, on Dicky,

There ain't no flies on Dicky

And I will tell you why.

He turned the key and locked the door.

The room was number five-oh-four,

So there ain't no flies on Dicky

And
that's
the reason why.'

Kaye took me to Enniskillen, and we walked by the solitude of Lough Erne in a long, calm evening, the great, empty expanse of water still as any pool, while a red sun smouldered and failed out of the sky. Kaye said she felt that if I threw in a sword, a hand would appear from the water and catch it by the hilt. Another time we went to Londonderry, walked round the walls and stood where Governor Walker had stood in July 1689, when King Billy's relieving ships broke the boom.

We went to Newry; and to Newcastle under the Mountains of Mourne, and climbed Slieve Donard in the rain. Once, having got a three-day pass, I took Kaye, wearing a mendacious wedding-ring, into the republic. We stayed at Collooney in the County Sligo, and walked out to Lough Arrow.

Before the end of 1941, however, I had become inwardly impatient with this static soldiering, which seemed to hold out no prospect of anything more active or exciting. A reorganization of the R.A.S.C. had resulted,
inter alia,
in the abolition of so large and bulky a unit as the ‘Corps Troops Petrol Park', which had really been better suited to World War I than to World War II organization. It was split up, and in the process, to my grief, I lost command of ‘G' section and became an officer in a smaller unit, the 3rd Corps Troops Petrol Company, stationed on the Maze race course. Frank Espley was not one of those who came with us, and inevitably he and I lost touch with each other. Sergeant Tuckey was still with me, and the two of us were given command of a completely ‘green' section, straight out of recruits' training depot. They weren't a bad lot, and after a few weeks we began to feel reasonably proud of them, and they of themselves. The trouble lay elsewhere; in the person of the commanding officer. I had better give him a pseudonym.

Major Trill was a regular officer, and very young indeed to be a major. He was not yet twenty-four. He was a tall, fair young man, intensely assiduous and lacking in any sense of humour. It was a small mess — not more than nine officers in all — and there wasn't much opportunity to keep clear of him. We had several tiffs, for he was inclined to be thin-skinned, conscious of his age, and also, as a regular, reckoned to larn us a thing or two before he was done. With nearly a year's experience of commanding a platoon on active service, I did not take kindly to this. There were other reasons, too, for feeling that Ulster had become a back-water for an officer who had gained some experience. The war in the Western Desert had begun in earnest. Wavell had defeated the Italians in his campaign of 1941, and only the fulfilment of the British obligation to divert troops to fight against the Germans in Greece had prevented him from forging on into Tripolitania. Greece had fallen to Hitler and then the German airborne troops, at enormous cost in casualties, had invaded and taken Crete, coming within half a plank of defeat in the process. By December 1941 Operation Barbarossa, the Wehrmacht's attack on Russia, which had begun in June 1941, had brought the Germans to the very outskirts of Moscow. During the same month the Japanese made their attack on Pearl Harbour and America entered the war. The first months of 1942 saw the high-water mark of the Axis, while at the same time, in February, Singapore fell to the Japanese. I am bound to admit that I personally was fully expecting Russia to be defeated, after which, no doubt, Germany would find itself ready at last to invade England. I had changed my original state of mind of being determined to avoid the infantry. I now reckoned that it was up to everyone, in the desperate straits we were in, to be ready to do something active. If you were going to be killed anyway, you might as well be killed fighting the enemy. At least it would be preferable, or so I thought, to continuing to kick around the Maze race course under the dubious command of Major Trill.

How was one, however, to get transferred to a more active role? It wasn't so easy. As an officer of a specialized arm (e.g., Signals, Engineers, Ordnance, R.A.S.C, Gunners, etc.) one could not simply leave that arm and transfer to another. To do so (it was reckoned) would be a waste of all the training (and experience) that had been lavished on you by the army.

While I was pondering the problem, I got a spell of leave and spent some two weeks at home; and it was here, round and about Newbury, that I first clapped my eyes on the newly-formed Airborne Forces. I was by no means of a sceptical temperament in those days: indeed, I was romantic and impressionable to a degree, and the sight of the red beret and the flamboyant blue and maroon pegasus flash excited me and went straight to my heart. This was the answer! I would volunteer for Airborne Forces! There were Airborne R.A.S.C. as there were Airborne Gunners, Sappers and Signals. I would transfer in my capacity as an R.A.S.C. officer.

Even this, however, proved very difficult. The Airborne Forces certainly had their talent scouts out in Ulster as in England, Wales and Scotland. One could put in for an interview, and I did. But they were, understandably, rather careful about whom they took, and at twenty-one I had no particular qualifications to recommend me, except that I was fit and willing. There were plenty of other people volunteering for no better reason than I; because they were browned off. Also, in those days I was under weight for my height of about five feet eight inches. One of the specified requirements was that the weight should ‘correlate normally with the height'. In short, I didn't seem to be able to get the Airborne to take me on.

By midsummer of 1942, I had had as much of Major Trill as I could stand. He plainly felt the same. I felt - I still feel - that he had begun to lie in wait for me, as it were, and drop on me for anything he could. My general feelings were almost identical to those of Charles Ryder at the beginning of
Brideshead Revisited.
I felt disillusioned and thoroughly bolshie. Finally, finding myself one fine day ‘on the mat' to the Major for what seemed to me no reason at all, I had the worst row of the lot and finished up by demanding an overseas posting. He was by no means unwilling: he had had enough of me, too.

It was in late July or early August of 1942 that I found myself in a draft of unattached R.A.S.C. officers forming at a depot in Halifax. We were all strangers to one another: I knew nobody. However, before leaving the Maze race course I had been given a tip by another of the subalterns, Johnny Lund. ‘I rather think,' said he, ‘that there's a friend of mine on that draft, a chap called Roy Emberson. If he's there, I should latch on to him if I were you. He's a good bloke, and doesn't give a hang for anyone.'

Roy Emberson
was
on the draft at Halifax, and proved to be a man after my own heart. I lost no time in getting to know him. He was about twenty-three or twenty-four. His appearance was in his favour: he was a likely-looking, handsome young man, with light-brown hair, brown eyes and a fresh complexion. The thing which struck me almost at once was his air of relaxed, unassuming self-confidence. In those war-time days, almost all young officers (and older ones) were living in unaccustomed circumstances and conditions, among people with whom they wouldn't have had much to do in peace-time. This insecurity often led many (including myself) into assuming one sort of air or another for the benefit of strangers - the tough man of few words, the man who seeks advantage by excessive courtesy, the detached man whose real thoughts are elsewhere, and so on. There was nothing at all like this about Emberson. He struck you as being quietly self-possessed and entirely himself. He didn't put on any sort of act - you felt - because he didn't need to. At the same time he wasn't detached. He was shrewd and alert. He seemed poised and in accord with his surroundings. He was secured as much by his limitations as his qualities. Nostalgia and sensitivity couldn't find a toehold anywhere in him. Privately, in my own mind, I nicknamed him ‘Harlequin': but just at the moment he was a Harlequin without a Columbine - though on the lookout, of course. Without being loquacious or self-assertive, he was debonair in manner, an adventurer, as it were, by temperament rather than by resolve. He seemed cheerful and carefree; an amusing, refreshing person to be with. During the months we spent together I never once heard him raise his voice. His favourite word of approval was ‘genuine': ‘a genuine sort of bloke'. He was certainly that himself.

After a day or two of each other's company at the depot, Roy and I found that a natural third had become added to us. This was, as Roy put it, ‘a long slab of an Irishman' called Paddy Gibbons. Tall he was, and a little older than either of us, with a noticeable touch of the brogue and a gently teasing way with him. I began to feel that the trip to the Middle East was going to be better fun than I had expected.

Round about this time the whole draft, of whom there were about thirty or so, received a briefing from some major who was technically in charge of us. The only thing he said which mattered — or that I remember - was that on board ship we would be four to a cabin. He said that those of us who had already formed groups of two or three should foregather on one side of the room, while the rest, who hadn't, should stay where they were. The already formed groups were then to ‘pick up' their complement from among the rest, just as teams are picked up at school. (‘We'll have Smith.' ‘We'll have Jones' etc.)

Now it so happened that the Adams-Emberson-Gibbons group seemed a shade unlucky in the choosing order. We were the penultimate group, and when it came to our turn there were only two people left. One was a gloomy, unlikeable man called Cairncross (that is not his name) whom nobody cared for. The other was a mere child of a subaltern, patently immature and shy, who had not summoned the savoir-faire to make any friends or to ‘put himself across' at all. The wretched two stood and waited while we conferred in a corner.

‘Take the boy,' said Paddy. ‘'Got to be better than Cairncross.'

After some hesitation, Roy and I agreed. We said we'd have the boy, who seemed glad not to be left the absolute last. I felt sorry for Cairncross - I who was no stranger to humiliation - but he had rather brought it on himself.

Our ‘boy' turned out to be called Giles. He was known, he said, to his friends as ‘Piggy' (but gave no reason for this). Piggy Giles proved an excellent fellow, honest, kind-hearted, good-natured and obliging. I think we all felt the better - more secure and more equal to the unforeseeable hazards of our impending journey - on account of the four-square team we'd now formed. I can't remember that during the ensuing months we ever had a serious disagreement among ourselves; but we pulled each other out of several holes, and avoided a few more because it became known that we were mutually supportive. I remember how one night a burly, aggressive fellow called Murphy got drunk and began trying to pick a quarrel with me. He became discouraged, however, when it was made plain to him that there were four of us.